There is a clear demand in the market for a simple, all-in-one, award display rack that allows a user to display, hold, and showcase a variety of accolades, including pin-style medals while they are within their 2⅝″×3⅝″×⅝″ cases.
It has been a long-standing tradition to reward artists, athletes, and other performers with award medals as a means of recognizing and acknowledging their achievements of excellence in a particular field, art, or sport. These medals come in two variations; as either ribbon-style lanyard medals or pin-style medals. Pin-style medals are presented inside plastic cases that have dimensions of 2⅝″ length×3⅝″ height×⅝″ depth (width).
It is not uncommon for a devoted athlete, artist, or performer to accumulate a large number of both kinds of these award medals during their career of participation in a given activity. It stands to reason that the recipient of said award medals would take great pride in displaying these hard-earned accolades. However, the available alternatives in this field are inadequate and often unnecessarily complicated and/or require undesirable means to accomplish this simple objective.
The vast majority of prior art is not designed to hold more than a few awards, and no prior art is designed to accommodate both styles of award medals (pin-style and lanyard style) commonly presented while simultaneously allowing for the pin-style medals to remain in their protective casing to guard against the undesirable effects of handling, use, and/or natural exposure. Furthermore, prior art in this field requires unnecessarily complicated procedures in order to attach, affix, or display the medal(s), eliminating an effortless reorganization or replacement of these award medals.
Award medals are given out as accolades in a plethora of societal activities; to name just a few, award medals are often presented for achievements throughout all levels of school sporting and academic competition, as well as independent performing arts, such as martial arts, swimming, gymnastics, dancing, and a countess list of others. It is not uncommon for someone such as a college athlete to accumulate an excess of fifty award medals over the course of their involvement in a particular sport. While some prior art supports the display of several medals, none are designed to offer a simple, practical, and compact means to display a large quantity of them while simultaneously accommodating multiple styles of accolades.
The shortcomings of prior art currently on the market are clear, none provide a practical means for an accomplished recipient of various styles of accolades, including lanyard-style and pin-style award medals, trophies and plaques to display their complete collection of awards all on one display unit. Prior art in this field is designed to either display a single type of medal, such as lanyard ribbon-style award medals or pin-style medals, however, not both simultaneously. As both types of these medals, as well as trophies and plaques, are all frequently awarded common accolades for athletes and performers, a product, such as the current invention, is desirable so that all a recipient's accolades can proudly be displayed together.
Another shortcoming addressed by the current invention is that prior art in this field for displaying pin-style medals requires meticulous construction and attachment of the pin-style medals to the display unit by physically pinning the medal to the display unit in one way or another. Such functionality makes it difficult to effortlessly display, organize, attach and or replace the medals on a display. Furthermore, pinning said pin-style medals to a display unit requires that the medals be manually handled and removed from their above referenced protective plastic casing(s). For multiple reasons, the handling of such medals and the removal of them from their protective plastic cases is highly undesirable and an unfortunate necessity of prior art in this field. Handling of heirloom and precious award medals can cause corrosion, breakage, and other unwanted consequences, thus necessitating the need for a product that allows pin-style award medals to be easily displayed, held, organized and stored while still in their original plastic casings.
The present invention, through the utilization of a staggered peg system and accompanying unique groove-style award medal case holder, offers a new, practical, and highly-desirable means for a successful performer to proudly display the full extent of their awards all on one unit, while also preserving their pin-style medal awards by allowing for their display while still in their 2⅝″×3⅝″×⅝″ plastic casings.
Prior art does not achieve the aforementioned benefits of the current invention, and thus requires the user to narrow the selection of awards they chose to display, or alternatively, display them in an unfavorable way which could cause detriment to the medals. The present invention remedies these issues while achieving an easy to operate and cost efficient product.